There's always the danger of "doing a Mozilla" - focusing on useless senior management pet projects until the point that they're unable to actually fund the thing that they're getting paid for.

The management probably don't see themselves as caretakers of incredibly valuable resource that needs to be preserved. Which is probably what 90% of the rest of humanity want them to be.

Actually phrased like that, the second is more interesting.

The first version is about centralizing all informations so it can be consumed. It's the traditional view of knowledge dissemination, scaled to the whole world instantaneously. The second version is about giving people the tool to produce knowledge so it can be shared with the whole world. Just like the printing press spread authoring power from a select few people who bothered to write everything, to anyone with enough money to buy a machine, Wikipedia is giving the power to share knowledge from those who had the right curriculum to anyone with a bit of motivation.

This is the revolution that Internet and the Web promised (not just allow everyone to watch and listen, but give everyone a voice), and I'm glad Wikipedia is doing it. If it takes more money to fulfill that mission then it's totally worth it.

I see it the other way around, "available to every person in the world." is the epitome of something distributed, more so than distributing something "effectively", which implies making compromises. So albeit unrealistic the first one would be more inspiring to me.

The 2nd one just tells me that they are actively engaging in the collection part now.

The first is empty, pseudo-aspirational, typical early 2000s SV, bordering on caricature hogwash.

The 2nd is mature, focused, grounded in reality and is actually what wikimedia does. So yeah #2 100%. But then again I'm not 12.

I think an organization can change its goal (in the same direction as the original one).